Samsung ups ante in smartphone wars with new Galaxy (with video)

Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun03.15.2013

JK Shin, President and Head of IT and Mobile Communications for Samsung Electronics, presents the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 during the Samsung Unpacked event at Radio City Music Hall, Thursday, March 14, 2013 in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

Samsung Introduces the GALAXY S 4 - A Life Companion for a Richer, Simpler and Fuller Life
/ BusinessWire

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NEW YORK — Samsung took its battle for smartphone supremacy to Times Square Thursday, launching its fourth-generation Galaxy phone, the S4, at a gala event at Radio City Music Hall, not far from Apple’s flagship store.

The event, broadcast live in Times Square, underscores the rivalry between the two tech giants, with Samsung leading the smartphone market worldwide yet Apple dominating the lucrative U.S. market.

And it marked the South Korean company’s first international smartphone launch hosted in North America.

The S4 lived up to predictions. It’s thinner, lighter and delivers a slightly larger screen — at five inches — than its predecessor, the S3. The display is a super-bright full HD resolution, at 441 pixels per inch the highest of any smartphone yet. The S3 has a more powerful processor, an upgraded 13-megapixel camera and long-anticipated features like an eye-tracking screen that automatically scrolls down as you read to the bottom of the page.

The new phone will be released starting at the end of April with 327 carriers in 55 countries, including Canada. No pricing was announced and likely won’t be until the carriers start taking pre-orders, expected to be about two weeks before the phones go on sale.

Among the 3,000 people who crowded into the Radio City Music Hall were Samsung partners from around the world, including representatives from Canadian wireless carriers Telus, Rogers, Bell, Wind Mobility and Videotron.

“They are very excited,” said Paul Brennan, vice-president of mobile communications for Samsung Canada. “The device from a carrier perspective is a real game changer.

“One carrier said it’s the first device that is less about the specs and more about it becoming a life companion.”

Brennan said the S4 marks a change that goes beyond the hardware to integrating the smartphone into every aspect of people’s lives, both at home and at work — whether it’s the ability to create a holiday photo album to be printed straight from the camera or the feature that lets users simply hover a finger over the screen to reveal all the photos in a file or the words in an email.

A key element in Samsung’s plan to push into the business market is its Knox security initiative, similar to that of the recently announced BlackBerry 10, which lets IT departments lock off corporate data and applications from a user’s personal side of the phone.

In the last two years, Samsung has emerged as Apple’s main competitor in the high-end smartphone market, while at the same time selling enough inexpensive low-end phones to edge out Nokia as the world’s largest phone maker.

As Samsung goes head to head with Apple, the battle has moved from the consumer arena to the corporate world. Samsumg is clearly hoping new security measures introduced for the S4 and Samsung’s other upcoming mobile devices will overcome IT departments’ concerns over Android security.

The Galaxy is Samsung’s flagship smartphone and a challenge to Apple’s iPhone 5, a challenge not likely to be answered until the middle of this year. That’s the earliest Apple is expected to release a successor to the iPhone5, likely to be dubbed the 5S.

The Galaxy S4 announcement comes weeks after the revitalized BlackBerry released its first BlackBerry 10 smartphone, the Z10, a phone that closely resembles rivals iPhone and Galaxy, with a keyboard model — the Q10 — due out later this month.

People lined up around the block for the launch, which was livestreamed over the Internet. Their patience was rewarded at the end of the show when they crowded around tables lined up with new S4 phones, although it will be weeks before they’ll be actually able to get one.

The camera has a number of new features, including a ‘dual camera’ function that lets the photographer insert him or herself into a photo by using the front-facing camera at the same time as shooting a photo with the 13MP back-facing camera. And the video chat extends to include up to three people at a time, with the same dual-camera functionality — so while you’re chatting, you can show what’s happening around you.

The S4 comes with several new technologies intended to help users interact with the phone. In a feature that seems straight out of a Harry Potter film, when photos are taken, the shot captures voices. So if you’re taking a photo of the kids to send to Grandma, when she opens the photo she can hear junior saying ‘Wish you were hear, Grandma.’

The screen also senses fingers hovering just above the screen, and some applications react. The Mail application shows the first few lines of an email when a finger hovers above it in the list.

The phone also has instant voice-to-text or text-to-voice translation.

In the onstage demo Thursday, when the English words were typed into the phone, it spoke in Chinese. Conversely, it delivered a text version in English of the Chinese reply.

Gillian Shaw’s airfare and accommodation to attend the Samsung S4 event was paid by Samsung.

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